Not This Crude Matter
by Eirian Erisdar
Summary: What would have happened, if Thanos wiping out half the universe affected the Star Wars galaxy. From Obi-Wan's perspective. Set in the later part of the Clone Wars. And yet in the end, there is as always hope. In response to a tumblr prompt. Gen. Oneshot.


**A/N: I was sent this prompt on tumblr, so I'm cross-posting here. This is set in the later period of The Clone Wars, right before what would have been the last events of season 5 of TCW.**

 **Also um...warning? Much character death? This is a lot darker than anything I've ever written.**

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 _ **Not This Crude Matter**_

 _Eirian Erisdar_

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 _Luminous beings are we; not this crude matter._

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Obi-Wan was the first to sense it.

In hindsight, it seemed only natural that he should be the only one to see it coming; in his childhood he dreamt of twin suns, and in his youth of a green lance of fire that shattered a blue-white sphere into nothing; and should the Unifying Force have continued, and time sped on uninterrupted, then he would have seen both these things for himself.

But _it_ was coming, a rending of space-time and the Force itself, screaming, writhing, and wrong.

Obi-Wan's voice broke off mid-order as he froze, gauntleted arm extended.

"Obi-Wan?" Anakin shouted over the rain of blaster-fire, the scream of his lightsaber suddenly overwhelming and close in the loss of Obi-Wan's; Ahsoka's voice behind them was lost in the _thud_ of plasma cannons

Across the field, at the head of the advancing columns of the Separatist forces, Dooku fell still, crimson lightsaber chambered at his side.

A plasma bolt passed so close to Obi-Wan's face that he did not hear so much as _feel_ its searing hiss; Anakin's shout as he leapt to defend him seemed to come from a far-off place, discordant and skewed in a cataclysmic wave that reared as it struck.

The blaster-fire stopped.

No, that was the wrong word for it; it did not stop so much as sweep into a crescendo with the oncoming storm-front, frozen forever in a scream so high-pitched and so desperate that it took Obi-Wan a long, sweat-chilled moment to understand it was the Force that was screaming.

Screaming, as the Living Force was rent apart and the Unifying erased in one inescapable, perfect storm.

On the field around him, half of the 501st and the 212th were dropped their blasters in a clattering cacophony of metal meeting rock.

Because their hands were no longer there.

And then there was a secondary rain of lightweight durasteel and plastoid alloy as the other half dropped their own DC-15s and ripped off their buckets, flinging out pleading hands only to plunge them through disintegrating chests and arms and necks, one after another until the field was filled with wailing, guttural howls.

And then they, too, started to melt away.

Above and around and within them was the ever-present and ever-building sigh of rustling, windblown leaves.

Dust, leaves, and ashes.

Obi-Wan stood frozen as the entire field of men - an ocean of candles in the Living Force - were snuffed out as cruelly and as finally as a breath from the belly of Death itself.

Cody slipped into the Force somewhere amongst his men, before Obi-Wan could even begin to reach.

Throughout it all, the Separatist forces stood silent and unmoving and as dead as the durasteel that made up its assault tanks and droids and heavy blasters.

Before them, Dooku raised his hand and watched as it dissolved into black sand, and that sand into nothing. He did not speak, but instead lifted his chin and gazed across the field at his grandpadawan; a stare that somehow bridged the scars of their lineage and the opposing sides of the war they found themselves in.

The Force flung itself across no-man's land and the field of dying men between them; Obi-Wan inhaled sharply, tasted dust on his tongue as his grand-master's Force-signature flickered and latched onto his mindscape.

Dooku did not speak. There was no time to do so.

There was only a strange sort of fondness echoing in the smile of a brown-haired padawan and a steady-handed master, one and the same in their shared memory.

Obi-Wan closed his eyes as Dooku's regret washed over him, another breaker in a tide that kept rising.

" _Qui-Gon always spoke very highly of you,"_ Dooku had once said to him in that dark holding cell on Geonosis. _"I wish he were still alive. I could use his help right now."_

Obi-Wan had thought, then, that they were only the silken, twisting words of a Lost Jedi who had chosen the wrong side of a war.

He knew they were not, now.

Dooku's lightsaber extinguished as it thudded to the ground, but what sound it made was lost in the cries of the dying and the living.

And then, somewhere behind Obi-Wan, Ahsoka screamed.

Obi-Wan whirled in place.

"Rex!" Anakin shouted, leaping forward.

Rex was on his knees, and the expression on his face was one of such young bewilderment that for that one instant before he dissolved into nothing he looked all of his twelve short years, a child soldier uncomprehending of his death.

Ahsoka flung her arms around him, and embraced only dust.

Anakin was frozen an arm's length from her, his own gloved hand filled with a handful of grey that bled into nothing in the wind when he opened his fist.

Obi-Wan stood as a shadow and a spectre, and could only watch in numb horror.

And then-

And then.

"Obi-Wan," Anakin murmured, faintly. His boots were blurring at the edges, as were his gloved fingers. As though an artist were watering down his outline, about to wash him from the picture, erased as though he never existed.

No.

 _No._

Obi-Wan's feet moved before he was aware of it. He caught Anakin around his shoulders before he could fall, allowed the Force to pour into his former padawan's - his _brother's_ \- fading form. In that moment, he wished to be nothing; a window so clear and transparent that the Force could wield him as it wished, and that he would be nothing at all.

The slow fading away of Anakin's form slowed, though it crept onward nevertheless, insidious, devastating, unstoppable.

Anakin - the furnace that never stopped burning, the hero with no fear who used to crawl into Obi-Wan's sleeping pallet as a child when the nightmares came - gasped in a breath in Obi-Wan's arms, raised wide eyes to meet his, and whispered, _"Padmé. Comm."_

It took a precious moment for Obi-Wan to understand the significance of the statement, and he found understanding in Ahsoka's gaze, too, knelt as she was with one hand on Anakin's shoulder.

Obi-Wan nodded, and Anakin's lips curved in the smallest of smiles.

Ahsoka scrabbled for Anakin's comm, flicked it open, and pressed in a code as Obi-Wan held Anakin tighter.

Anakin shivered in his arms.

For a terrifying few seconds it seemed as though the comm channel would not open; but then in a burst of subspace static, it held.

" _Anakin! I'm so glad you're alright, the Chancellor and so many others have-"_

At Padme's voice, Anakin's expression changed into one of such gentleness that Obi-Wan almost looked away - it was too private a moment.

"I love you," Anakin said, breath hitching. The dust had crept up to his elbows and past his knees, now. "I love you so much."

A pause.

" _No,"_ Padmé said, so strongly that Obi-Wan almost believed it would stop the slow progression of death up Anakin's limbs. This was the former queen, the Senator who should have been Chancellor.

"I love you," Anakin repeated, no more than a susurration of air.

Padme's voice was degenerating into sobs, now. _"Don't do this, please,"_ she gabbled. _"Don't- I need you here._ We _need you here."_

Obi-Wan inhaled sharply. Ahsoka clapped both her hands over her mouth.

Anakin's eyes had begun to slip shut, but he seemed to force them open with the last dregs of his strength. "What?" he whispered.

" _I'm pregnant, Ani. Five weeks."_

For a moment, Anakin's face was frozen.

Then joy spread across it in a burst of starlit incandescence.

"I'm so happy," he said, his smile wider than the sky, even as his body flickered. His eyes raised up to Obi-Wan's - and there was such pure joy in them that Obi-Wan felt ashamed for the tears that spilled over his own.

"I'm so happy, Padme," Anakin murmured, closing his eyes.

The Force let Anakin Skywalker go.

Obi-Wan looked down at the dust in his hands, and felt the first of his tears drip past his beard; saw it splash in a darker black against the grey. The Force was no longer speaking to him; he felt nothing. Heard nothing. Saw nothing.

Ahsoka pressed both her hands into the ground as tears slid down her cheeks.

There was something incredibly wrong about the fact that it was _Ahsoka_ who was weeping; Ahsoka, Anakin's brave, brave padawan, hewn of steel and verve and sass and power.

And when she was vulnerable, she was quietly strong, and enduring, and kind.

Not this. Never this.

And then her fingers, too, began to fade, melting into the hard-packed dirt.

Ahsoka stopped crying very abruptly, staring down at them.

Obi-Wan scrambled towards her.

Ahsoka looked up at him with red-rimmed eyes and said, very quietly, "It's okay, Master Kenobi."

The dust was at her shoulders and hips, now.

What was left of Obi-Wan Kenobi broke.

" _Take me,"_ he screamed, though he knew it was not the Force that he screamed to, but death itself. _"Take me instead-"_

Death did not. Death never did; not Obi-Wan Kenobi, the steward and the watcher.

Ahsoka tumbled into nothing, and Obi-Wan knelt there, a single, brown-hooded figure in a field of dust and fallen leaves, waiting for his own end to come.

It didn't.

Obi-Wan buried his face in his hands and howled.

By his right knee, Padmé's sobs echoed out of Anakin's comm. Together they made a cruel duet; and then abruptly, the channel cut off.

Silence, save for the wind and the creaking of the Separatist forces, frozen forever with their blasters trained on the single Jedi left before them.

The Force, broken as it was, curled around Obi-Wan's shoulders.

Through it Obi-Wan saw things he did not understand.

A purple-skinned arm, and a gold gauntlet set with six glowing stones. Another world, so many light-years away that Obi-Wan trembled at the distance and weight of the years.

Even now the Force wanted something of him.

"What do you want of me?" he whispered to the Force. "I cannot go there."

A huff of hot breath over his head.

Obi-Wan's heart leapt into his throat as he turned his head.

A white-haired wolf bared sharp teeth down at him in a feral grin. Then it turned and offered him his back.

An inkling of legend curled in Obi-Wan's mind, of Loth-wolves and ancient Temples, before the Order called themselves _Jedi._

 _Oh._

The Force buoyed up under Obi-Wan's nerveless feet, guided his hand to pick up Anakin's comm and tuck it into his belt, and gave him strength he did not know he had to climb up on the Loth-wolf's back.

It was warm and steady and _alive_ , and as the wolf began loping away from the battlefield, the world blurred into another and the Force began to sing.

Perhaps the Force was leading Obi-Wan to a new war; perhaps the galaxy he knew and the Republic he served would never be the same again. But there is a lightsaber in his hand, and the Force, broken though it was, was humming in his veins.

They ran on, luminous.

 **END**

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 **I've got a long weekend, so I'm hoping to get another chapter of _Silent Measures_ out in the next few days. I've just finished an exam and the next crazy attachment is coming, so I want to get some writing done with as soon as possible. Thanks for reading as always, guys. If anyone's interested and missed it, _Five Choices_ is a oneshot I wrote a while back from Loki's perspective of Infinity War.**


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